Patrick Holford makes many interesting claims during a promotional segment for Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs on The Late Late Show.
Timestamp on video: 20:00 The Late Late Show, RTE Television. 3 November 2006
Patrick Holford: Every single section, on arthritis, on diabetes, hormonal imbalance, depression, attention deficit, etc. Every single chapter was checked by a professor who specialised in that area.
This means that somewhere, some cardiovascular/cardiology expert signed-off on the Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs claim that the Number Needed to Treat for statins is 19,600. It would be fascinating to know the identity of this un-named reviewer, particularly as that claim was so outlandish that it was obvious to anyone else less than half a second after it hit the eyeball. And it only took that long because the eyeball was still fluttering with unfocused outrage at having been subjected to such nonsense.
Are the medical professors who signed off on the book content [the] same ones who will be [running] Holford’s training courses in nutrition, “taught by doctors for doctors”? I think we should be told.
I have no idea. The same commenter has introduced me to an exciting new area of academic endeavour: nervology is, “the science of the acquisition of chutzpah for the purpose of peddling woo”.
Is it possible that some of this cadre of reviewers are subject-matter specialists with a minor speciality in nervology? We definitely need to know the identity of the reviewers who signed-off on some of the more outrageous claims in Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs.
Don’t know if it is related to this but Ben Goldacre notes a perpetual motion machine is “validated as working by eight unnamed independent scientists and engineers “with multiple PhDs from world-class universities” (although sadly they’ve declined to name them, citing mutually binding non-disclosure agreements)”. I would imagine you would be told that something similar precludes you learning who reviewed which sections of the book but I hope I’m wrong.
Goldacre also posits a “first law of bullshit dynamics, which I suspect this invention may well obey, as follows: “there is no imaginable proposition so absurd that you cannot find at least one person, somewhere in the world, with a PhD or professional post, who is happy to endorse it” .
Just saying.
I would like to buy a book called food is better than drugs. Can you please email me the list of the bookshops that i can get this book. I am from South Africa, Limpopo Province City Polokwane
Thank you
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